Kitchen Stories (Part 1)
February 24, 2005

There's a lot to love about the Sixties, but the vintage 1960 kitchen in our Live Oak house was not necessarily one of them. While perfectly functional, its dingy, yellowed paint and excessive Formica had lost their quaint charm. After years of threatening an upgrade, this year we finally plunged in; Art Boy took some time off painting art to paint walls and cabinets instead.

Painting was the operative idea, not an extreme makeover. And we didn't want to spend a fortune. With the rest of our house so white (the better to showcase art), we wanted fun colors in the room where we both cook, eat, and make merry three times a day. We didn't want cold or impersonal: nothing black or stainless steel, no granite, no marble. This would be a living space, not a photo spread.

Our kitchen is galley style (which appeals to my inner pirate), two facing rows of cabinets and appliances with a window in the wall at the end. We'd replaced the confetti-style linoleum with hardwood flooring when we remodeled another part of the house 18 years ago. Otherwise, the kitchen was original: pale aqua cabinets with avocado green interiors, and gold-flecked white Formica countertops unchanged since the Kennedy administration. The original owners were an Italian couple we can thank for our back yard planted with luscious Mediterranean fruit trees—figs, plums, Sorrento lemons. They were less handy with the kitchen, where the hand-made plywood cabinets are rarely square to the uneven walls, and none of the drawers are on runners, leaving sawdust deposits in the cabinets below.

Yet, the kitchen's funky, hand-crafted quality has always appealed to Art Boy, who's a build-it-yourself kind of guy. And I once had the pleasure of meeting the original owner; she was by then a widow, and while the other changes in her old house didn't impress her much, she was delighted that I'd kept her aqua cabinets—the color she loved. So I wanted to keep some variation of aqua in the kitchen, in her honor. The house has its own soul, nurtured with love, just like the fruit trees. By keeping faith with the spirit of the original owners, we'd keep the house happy.

We kept our reliable old refrigerator, and spiffed up the vintage Norge stove with new copper paint on its hood. (After Art Boy painstakingly excavated eons of grime from the fan.) I had grandiose plans for a greenhouse window, but since that wall faces west, anything growing in there would be fricaseed in a week. (And I'm already battling a reputation as the Plant Murderer of Santa Cruz.) I settled for a sleek new slider when the window store had one in stock within an inch of the dimension we needed at a third of the price, left over from another job.

For the empty unused corner beside the window, Art Boy decided to build new cabinets, top and bottom, from the supply of recycled plywood he keeps for paintings—allowing for the addition of a staggering five extra feet of counter space. Which gave us the excuse to get rid of the old Formica and replace it with—well, new Formica (half the cost of Corian), but in a cooler design.

At the counter shop, we picked up aqua-friendly color chips with jazzy names like Verdigris, Burnished Spruce, and my personal favorite, Krypton. (Names, of course, are as important as the colors themselves.) Bayou Dust didn't have the same zing as a name, but we liked the dark teal green color and set out to find a coordinating shade for the cabinets. A trip to the paint store yielded a handful of color swatches with equally vivacious names. I was dying to use Mermaid Green, in honor of the merfolk novel I'm writing, the Mexican tin mermaid angel over my sink, and my wonderful custom spoon with a merman slithering around the handle carved by local woodworker Ron Cook. But the color seemed a bit much, so we shifted toward the more modest and sedate Seafoam. We didn't want to go too crazy, since we were also planning to tile the sink backsplash. How much color would be too much?

In the meantime, we'd scrubbed the walls and ceiling with an old wives' solution of vinegar and water, stripping away enough grease to expose a surface new paint would stick to. After 45 years of discoloration, this was the room where we craved clean white walls. But when Art Boy repainted, it was snowblind white, arctic; the rest of the house looked dingy by comparison. Suddenly, it didn't seem like anything could be "too much color." Bring on the Mermaid Green!

In fact we chose an even wilder cabinet color, Bermuda Teal, a bright green-turquoise guaranteed to wake up the eyeballs of anyone stumbling into the kitchen for morning tea. Nothing modest or sedate about it: I couldn't wait!

I was upstairs working in my office the day Art Boy painted the first cabinet. Glancing downstairs through the pass-through, I could only see a single strip of color. It looked insanely vivid. I went downstairs and turned the corner for the full frontal assault of Bermuda Teal.

Oh my god. What were we thinking?
(To be continued…)